March Top refashion

A couple of weeks ago I did my seasonal wardrobe switch over, and among a lot clothes that I was excited to wear again, a couple had some issues. The worse one was this jumpsuit (Vogue 9075), made in off-white linen. I think it’s my first “one piece” make, and well I made a few mistakes. The first being the fabric-pattern pairing. This linen is lovely but it doesn’t work with this pattern since linen tends to grow and this pattern needed something more stable for the bodice. The waistline dropped over time, the neckline was gaping (my mistake, I didn’t make a toile) and the back darts opened failing to the tension of the stitches (not sure what happened here). I wore it only a couple of times because it wasn’t very comfortable or practical. See-through on the back, not very easy to have an invisible zipper on the back for bathroom breaks, and it was pulling when I was seating.

Luckily the legs had a lot of fabric that I could re-use for a blouse. I had this idea in mind for a boho blouse with lace insert, and I thought that this linen would have worked well.

The pattern

I went for the March Top and Dress from Helen’s Closet because I was looking for a pattern with a central panel to add lace on the sides and a clear cut line to add lace to the sleeves. This pattern has a lined central panel for the bodice and dropped sleeves set in horizontally, so I thought it would have been perfect for my idea. I bought some lace (4 yards) from Jones & Vandemeer (they have great trims) and proceeded to cut my pattern (size 10).

I hacked the pattern quite a bit, both because of the trim addition and because of the limited fabric amount that I had. These are my edits:

I reduced the central panel width so that when adding the lace, the overall width of the bodice would be unchanged
I lengthened the top part of the blouse it by 5 inches and removed the peplum. I decided to remove the peplum because I liked the idea of having the lace continuing up to the hem of the top. Ideally I would lengthened it by 7” (2″ more than i did), but I didn’t have enough fabric.
I reduced the sleeve width by 1.5” on the top only. My fabric was not wide enough, but I think that the sleeves still kept the overall line.
Instead of having a full front piece with the front central panel stitched on top (like in the pattern) I cut the central panel twice, inserting the lace in between, and re-drafted the side panels as separate pieces. In doing this I ended up with smaller pieces that fitted in the leg’s with.
I hemmed the top with bias binding because I didn’t want to lose length.

I studied the instructions carefully before making these changes, and I really appreciated the detail and tips given by the pattern. I ended up improvising quite a bit because of the edits, but I was happily surprised by my first pattern from Helen’s Closet. And here’s the blouse!

I’ll admit that once put on I was quite unsure about it. I like the idea of it, but I’m not sure it’s very me. This is one of the downfall of sewing, you can’t really try it on before having actually made the garment. So as I always do in these cases I styled it with some of my clothes to see how wearable it could have been.

..with white Dawn jeans (Megan Nielsen) and RTW vest

After this try on I feel way more optimistic about this blouse. I think my favorite pairings are with the cream pants and with the red skirt. What do you think?